Joe Lycett: ‘I don’t think Labour politicians would like being made fun of… the Tories didn’t care’
A few years ago, Joe Lycett would have insisted he wasn’t a political comedian. Sure, the stand-up comic had caused havoc in Conservative HQ after reportedly tricking senior figures with a parody Sue Gray report he’d shared online. And, yes, he’d made a name for himself offering sarcastic messages of support to scandal-hit Tory ministers (one sample message to Suella Braverman after her Rwanda deal was blocked: “@suellabraverman ignore the haters babe (by haters I mean the royal court of justice)”. But in interviews, Lycett denied it.
Fast-forward two and a half years, and the 36-year-old is one of the country’s most prominent Tory teasers. I’m meeting Lycett, and have to know: does he really still think he’s not? “Nah, I basically am, aren’t I?” he scoffs, playfully. “I didn’t start out with that in mind, and I’m not trained in that way… But I can’t deny that I’m politically motivated these days.” Lycett chuckles. “But it was the previous government that did that. Which was nice of them.”
For all his loathing of the “really horrible, nasty group of people” that make up the Conservative Party, the Birmingham native can thank the Tories for much of his fame. For years, Lycett was a mid-tier name on the British stand-up scene and panel-show circuit, fighting corporate injustice on his consumer rights programme Joe Lycett’s Got Your Back. But his political stunts were getting more traction.
Things reached a head in 2022, when, during an appearance on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Lycett deadpanned that he was a big supporter of newly appointed PM Liz Truss. Simply by claiming to be “very right-wing”, he gave the conservative commentariat a collective aneurysm, and secured his spot as a future national treasure for his fans.
Lycett clearly loves attention, and admits as much. We’re meeting in a central London coffee shop; Lycett is dressed in a Timmy Mallett-like ensemble of white shirt and trousers, both of which are covered in huge, colourful prints of paintings. A pair of garish, Elton John-esque blue sunglasses are perched on the table in front of him. On closer inspection, I realise his shirt is actually covered in his own portraits: the kind of scratchy acrylic paintings of celebrities Lycett frequently shares with his 1 million Instagram followers. “You can imagine people at Birmingham New Street looking at me wearing this thing,” he says, brows raised.
The outfit might suggest otherwise, but Lycett is far more subdued in person than the fast-talking, prank-playing whirlwind he’s known as. The coffee he orders, for one, is decaf. Nowadays, he admits, his comedy persona is “almost entirely different to what I’m like in real life”. “I live a quieter life than I used to,” he says. As a bisexual man who spends most of his evenings at home watching TV shows such as Severance with his girlfriend, he sees his work as his “outlet for campness”.
It’s not the only way in which Lycett differs in person from the onscreen, onstage version of himself. Despite building a career by taking shots at everyone from politicians and footballers to banks and oil giants, the Late Night Lycett host is remarkably willing to criticise himself throughout our conversation.
He’s aware, for instance, that his steady stream of pranks – from leaking fake news stories to the media to launching a pretend podcast called “Turdcast” – means that everything he does is now treated with “suspicion”, and admits that “it’s become a bit of a problem”. He’s been trying to get in contact with culture secretary Lisa Nandy to discuss a campaign about improving conditions for arts sector workers, and “her team have, quite understandably, been going, ‘Don’t go anywhere near him, because he’ll do some f***ing stupid thing and make us all look silly.’”
In order to circumvent this, Lycett reckons working anonymously is the answer. Weeks after we meet, banners bearing the words “Stop the Arts” appear over Shakespeare’s Globe. Lycett later reveals himself as the culprit, and addresses Nandy directly in a corresponding Instagram video. “I know you care passionately about the arts, and have done ever since you were given this job about 17 minutes ago,” he ribs.
Lycett is still figuring out how he’s going to approach Labour now they’re the ones in power. “I don’t know yet, really,” he says, admitting that it’s hard to “analyse” so far when so little has happened (we’re talking pre-Freebiegate). “But I think there’s a chance that people like me will have more of a chance of getting stuff through, because the last government were sort of soulless. They didn’t care if I made fun of them, because who gives a s***.”
He’s a friend of Birmingham Yardley MP Jess Phillips, and Lycett has met other Labour ministers and MPs over the years – although, he says, “I don’t think they’d like being made fun of, in a way that the Tories didn’t care.” In theory, Labour should be “more malleable”, he notes, before adding: “But I think once you’re in power, power is just a corrupting thing.”
For such a well-known jokester, Lycett doesn’t feel entirely comfortable in the rebel role. He’s impish, absolutely, but he’s also a hard worker, constantly juggling the various facets of his public persona: stand-up, showrunner, presenter, gardening influencer.
Raised in the leafy, middle-class suburb of Solihull, and attending a grammar school, Lycett says he was ultimately brought up “to be polite and not to be rude” – it was his “gobby” personality that got in the way. “I really hate being told to shush or any of that. I get a real flood of cortisol when somebody tells me to not do something,” he says. That seems like a catalyst for his entire career, I suggest, and he laughs. “Yeah, that’s it. There it is. I was rebellious, but always done in a nice way. I think.”
The son of two artists (his mum was a graphic designer who did illustrations for Cadbury’s, his dad a shop-front designer), Lycett was obsessed with graphic design as a teenager, and he pursued that career before committing to comedy. In recent years, art and design have once again become a prominent part of Lycett’s work. He featured in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition this year, and regularly posts his brightly coloured canvases of plants, animals, and Harry Styles.
Lycett attempted to sue Styles over an overdue payment of a KitKat Chunky he’d been promised in return for the artwork, though this was later revealed to be a stunt mocking the legal activities of an oil company. “Of course, threatening to sue Harry Styles is ridiculous, but Shell’s multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Greenpeace is all too real,” he said, as he encouraged his followers to donate to the environmental group.
Now, the best of Lycett’s artistic ability is on display in Art Hole, a compendium of the comedian’s funniest celebrity portraits and his fantastical writing about how they came to be. He shows me some of his favourites on his phone. There’s the “Mona Lisa Scott Lee”, depicting the Steps star posing like Leonardo da Vinci’s muse with a copy of Cheryl Cole’s seminal 2012 memoir Cheryl: My Story, as well as former deputy PM Thérèse Coffey, and Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford.
As he points out his portraits of the recently divorced former king and queen of ITV daytime, while mournfully interjecting: “RIP to that relationship”, I realise that it’s Holmes and Langsford who are emblazoned on his shirt, taking pride of place on his chest.
Lycett loves art, but isn’t entirely confident when I ask if he identifies as an artist. “Yeah?” he asks, mostly questioning himself. “I think so. Yeah. It sounds haughty and wanky, but actually, I make art, so I am an artist.” He wants to encourage people to “have a go”, no matter their perception of their talent. “It’s just the joy of doing it,” he says.
So we have Lycett the artist, too, then. But when I suggest he’s only adding strings to his bow, he clarifies that “it’s more just they’re all frayed strings [already] on the bow”. What I do question is where stand-up comedy currently fits in his overstuffed bag of tricks. Lycett started performing when he was a drama student at university in Manchester, finding that comedy scratched “whatever that need in me is for praise”.
